Linux 5.6 final should be out by the end of March or first weekend of April but in the mean time 5.6-rc4 marks roughly the midway point for this first 2020 spring kernel update.
Linux 5.6 is a very exciting kernel with tons of new functionality for both end-users and developers. In terms of Linux 5.6-rc4, there has been a lot of bug/regression fixes over the past week.
Linus Torvalds wrote of 5.6-rc4, "Fairly reasonably sized rc4, and the diffstat looks nice and flat too (which basically means "lots of small changes") except for a netfilter ipset fix that ended up being somewhat big and involved due to locking changes. That single commit shows up in the dirstat too, and accounts for about 1/6th of the whole patch. Anyway, everything else looks fairly small. There's a couple of ethernet drivers that got a few bigger changes, but there really is a lot of small stuff all over: architectures (x86, arm64, risc-v), drivers (gpu, hid, networking), filesystems (zonefs and ext4), and some tracing code."
Also hitting Linux 5.6-rc4 this week and since back-ported is an Intel KVM virtualization security fix.
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